'Cloned' Beef Scare Lacks Meat

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'Cloned' Beef Scare Lacks Meat

A report claiming that consumers have been unwittingly eating cloned cattle has consumer groups in an uproar, but a geneticist says that it's simply a case of misunderstood science.

The report in Wednesday's Nihon Keizai Shimbun business newspaper said that cloned cattle bred in livestock research institutions had been shipped to market and that the public may have consumed the beef without knowing.

Japan's largest consumer group on Thursday called on the government to explain the safety of beef from cloned cattle after the Agriculture Ministry said that the meat had been sold for four years in Nara prefecture (located in central Japan).

"The Ministry has the responsibility to explain in detail to consumers why these products are safe. The consumer should then be able to choose whether they want to accept the product or not," said Shuichi Watanabe, safety policy service manager at the Japanese Consumers' Cooperative Union.

"The problem is everything is over by the time the consumer finds out [about the consequences]," said Watanabe.

However, animal scientists say the newspaper report was based on a misunderstanding of routine breeding technology used all over the world.

"This isn't cloning like Dolly or cloning Hitler," said Scott Davis, a professor of genetics and animal science at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. "It has nothing to do with cloning at all."

Davis said that the Japanese researchers were using a routine breeding technique called embryo splitting that can dramatically multiply the number of offspring produced by a prized cow. Instead of having six or seven calves in a lifetime, the technology can produce 60 or more offspring, Davis said.

Scientists use hormones to stimulate the cow's egg production, and flush 20 to 30 eggs from the animal. The eggs are fertilized and the developing embryo split surgically to create 40 to 60 identical twin embryos.

The embryos are then implanted in surrogate mothers and carried to term normally.

"It's the same thing as having twins or triplets naturally," Davis said. "It's not a big deal, but it is expensive. It's not done very often; only when you have animals with very superior genetics."

Likewise, an official for Japan's Agricultural Ministry said that the cows were created by splitting fertilized eggs rather than by altering genes.

"There is no genetic engineering involved in this process," said the official at the ministry's Livestock Industry Bureau. "It is the same thing as having twins and triplets under natural circumstances, so I don't know why it has become such a big deal."

The Agriculture Ministry said that 370 calves were born between 1990 and 1998 using the fertilized egg-based cloning process.

The Japanese newspaper report reflects the heated debate currently raging about genetically modified food, particularly in Europe, which has been recently hit with food scares like Britain's mad cow disease.